In 1996, a potential pandemic could stay hidden for 167 days before being detected — but by 2009, that number was down to 23 days. Our pandemic detection technology has gotten much more sophisticated, as Larry Brilliant told us at TED2013, but there is still work to do. Photo: Ryan Lash/TED

Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant remembers the day in 1974 when, while working for the United Nations in India, a mother handed him her young son, who had died only moments earlier from smallpox. Brilliant also remembers the day, about a year later, when he traveled by speedboat to an island in Bangladesh and met a 3-year-old girl who had survived the disease. Hers was the last case of killer smallpox in the world.

These two memories bookend the new autobiography, Sometimes Brilliant. In the book, Brilliant tells the story of how killer smallpox — a 10,000-year-old disease that killed half a billion people in the 20th century alone — was eradicated, through tireless groundwork and an effort to understand the cultural dynamics that allowed the disease to spread. Brilliant’s work ending smallpox, and later polio, earned him the 2006 TED Prize. His wish at the time: to harness the power of technology and build a global detection system for pandemics. He hammered on the mantra, “Early detection, early response.”

With the TED Prize, Brilliant launched InSTEDD, a worldwide surveillance system that monitors the web and social media for patterns that may signal a pandemic. While it’s not the topic of his book, InSTEDD has grown a lot in 10 years, and morphed from a single system to a web of approaches. InSTEDD now connects more than 100 digital disease-detection partners and provides tools that help the UN, WHO and CDC track potential pandemics. InSTEDD has also opened two iLabs in regions considered pandemic hotspots, one in Cambodia and the other in Argentina.

“It’s the best of all possible worlds,” said Brilliant in a phone call last week. “Instead of one major top-down system, where my vision was flawed, we have this proliferation of hundreds of systems working on early detection. Some look at parking lots at ERs, and whether there’s more cars than expected for the season. Others hold hackathons to create epidemiological tools.”

“A whole new science has emerged called ‘participatory surveillance,’” he continued. He applauded opt-in systems in Australia, Brazil, the US and many other countries, where — say, once a week — participants get a text message or email that asks them how they feel. “Not everyone responds, but enough do that you can make a map,” said Brilliant. “Those systems are faster at detecting pandemic potential than reports made by governments.”

Still, we can do better, said Brilliant. In the case of Ebola, for example, it took months before the WHO declared an outbreak in West Africa — and the delay cost thousands of lives, he said. The movement of MERS further underscored the importance of early response. The disease originated in Saudi Arabia, and when a case exported to Korea in 2015, it led to 186 cases. When a case exported to Thailand months later, health officials dodged an outbreak. “Thailand has one of the world’s best detection systems,” said Brilliant, pointing to the participatory surveillance app DoctorMe. “They found that case of MERS immediately.”

In the epilogue of Sometimes Brilliant, Brilliant calls winning the TED Prize “a turning point in my life.” It led to increased public attention on early pandemic detection, inspiring the 2011 film Contagion and energizing foundations to invest in pandemic control. It connected Brilliant with Google, where he became the director of Google.org, and introduced him to Contagion producer Jeff Skoll. Brilliant now serves as Chair of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, where he has his eye on pandemics — as well as on climate change, water security, nuclear proliferation and Middle East conflict.

Brilliant said he will always look back on the day he saw the last case of smallpox as proof that serious threats can be neutralized. He said, “The image of the last case of smallpox is what I offer as an antidote to all the pessimism and to the feeling that we’re a hopeless mob, and the best we can do is find our own bunker.”

]]>larry-brilliant-featuredkatetedIn 1996, a potential pandemic could stay hidden for 167 days before being detected — but by 2009, that number was down to 23 days. Our pandemic detection technology has gotten much more sophisticated, as Larry Brilliant told us at TED2013, but there is still work to do. Photo: Ryan Lash/TEDsometimes-brilliant-coverCan we end pandemics in our lifetime? Larry Brilliant suggests we are getting much closerhttp://ideas.ted.com/larry_brilliant_since_the_talk/
http://ideas.ted.com/larry_brilliant_since_the_talk/#commentsWed, 13 Nov 2013 18:40:11 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=83591[…]]]>

By tracking social media, it turns out, we can get much better at recognizing pandemics early. Solving epidemics has been the goal of physician Larry Brilliant’s career — and the basis for his 2006 TED Prize wish
Larry Brilliant: My wish: Help me stop pandemics
, which he updated this year in a talk at TED2013, above. His wish called for an “International System for Total Early Disease Detection,” or InSTEDD, a project with the mantra “Early detection, early response” — which included, among other features, tracking stories on the web to watch for patterns that indicate an epidemic is about to break out.

After winning the TED Prize, Brilliant founded InSTEDD, a nongovernmental, multilingual, worldwide digital surveillance system that monitors the web, global news and social media for phrases and patterns that may signal a brand-new pandemic. In this update, Brilliant shares new data that shows … it’s working. In the 1990s, it took hundreds of days to identify a new potential pandemic. In 2012, he says, that number is down to 23 days. In the video above, he shows how it works and reveals what’s next.

But to start (spoiler alert), he shares a powerful clip from the movie Contagion, for which he was an advisor, to show how a new epidemic, born in a remote jungle, might enter the flow of humanity around the globe.

“Since the Talk” is a regular feature in which we go back to speakers in the years after they gave their TED Talk. We explore progress and updates on the talk’s idea to find out what happened next. Read more Since the Talk posts »

Today we present a fine 2006 reserve from physician, epidemiologist and TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant on stopping pandemics.Larry Brilliant’s background is admittedly “unconventional”, but it is precisely his avant-garde approach to life that formed the mise en scène for participating in extraordinary, world-changing projects. As a doctor in the early 1970s he joined a cross-continent hippie bus tour, spanning from San Francisco to England, in the film Medicine Ball Caravan. Brilliant then traveled over the Khyber Pass to India and studied at a Himalayan monastery…until his guru advised him to join the World Health Organization campaign to eradicate the small pox pandemic. In 1974 small pox broke out in India, so Brilliant joined a massive 150,000-person WHO campaign to conduct an old-fashioned door-to-door inquiry (jocularly referred to by Brilliant as “the surveillance system of the 1970s”) as to whether anyone in the home had contracted the virus. In order to eradicate the virus, each case of the disease had to be identified and contained, and after over 1 billion door-to-door visits, Brilliant and the team achieved the first disease eradication in history in 1980, when Brilliant presided over the last killer case of small pox. Working on the small pox campaign, Brilliant discovered the imperative for early detection surveillance systems and early response to diseases. Brilliant applied the lessons of surveillance and epidemiology to blindness and founded the Seva Foundation, which last year alone restored sight to more than 500,000 people worldwide.

For Brilliant’s TED Prize wish, he decided to capitalize on the lessons of early detection and early response to create INSTEDD, a global early-warning system to detect and respond to budding pandemics. Brilliant wanted to build upon the excellent work of an existing organization, GPHIN, which, through the process of web crawling discovered SARS and prevented it from reaching pandemic level. INSTEDD seeks to optimize today’s technologies so everyone can benefit from life-saving information. Currently INSTEDD is working on a major project in Southeast Asia to determine how new or existing software tools can help find diseases sooner and facilitate a collaborative response.

In 2006 Brilliant was appointed as the Executive Director of Google.org, Google’s $2 billion philanthropic arm that invests in some for-profit and not-for-profit projects such as renewable energy and pandemic prediction. This April, Brilliant left Google.org to be president of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund, a group founded by Jeff Skoll, president of eBay, to tackle climate change, water scarcity and pandemics. Brilliant will remain an advisor to Google.org, which has a history of collaboration with Skoll’s organization that Brilliant hopes to further develop.

What is life? Can we create it? Customize it? Edge has just published over six hours of video from their new Master Class on the future of biology, which attempts to answer those and other provocative questions. Featuring geneticists George Church and Craig Venter, the set is a a surprising, challenging look at what science has in store for our world, from the minds of two of the field’s most fascinating pioneers.

In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already — life as we know it is transformed […] by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/new_edge_videos/feed/4matthewtoastventer_church.jpgGoogle Flu Trends uses web search to track real fluhttp://blog.ted.com/google_flu_tren/
http://blog.ted.com/google_flu_tren/#commentsWed, 12 Nov 2008 15:15:00 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2008/11/google_flu_tren/[…]]]>
From Google.org (headed by 2006 TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant) comes this neat data display: Google Flu Trends. The project came about after some Google search engineers wondered if, in communities where more people searched on the term “flu,” there might actually be more flu. After talking with the Predict and Prevent group at Google.org, they came up with a tool that, they write:

uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/dick_clark_on_j/feed/4tedstaffLarry Brilliant profiled in Rolling Stonehttp://blog.ted.com/larry_brilliant_2/
Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:30:51 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2008/04/larry_brilliant_2/[…]]]>2006 TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant is profiled in the latest Rolling Stone. The long piece talks about Brilliant’s amazing life, from the hippie days of the 1960s, to his time in India helping eradicate smallpox, to his current job as head of Google.org, charged with spending some of Google’s money to solve global health crises and promote alternative energy. A fun snip from the story:

… one afternoon in the fall of 2005, while Brilliant was golfing in San Francisco, his cellphone rang. It was Chris Anderson, curator of the TED Conference, an annual gathering of scientists, thinkers and Silicon Valley elites. Anderson informed Brilliant that he had won the TED Prize, which came with $100,000 to launch a project of his choosing to make the world a better place (other winners have included Bill Clinton, Bono and scientist E.O. Wilson). Brilliant, who didn’t know who Anderson was, thought it was a crank call.

]]>tedstaffWhy be optimistic? Larry Brilliant at Skoll World Forum, on TED.comhttp://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_makes_the_case_for_optimism?language=en
Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:00:00 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2007/11/larry_brilliant_1/[…]]]>Recorded at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, Oxford, UK:2006 TED Prize winner and Google.org director Larry Brilliant uses a clip from an old Frank Capra movie to show that we’ve known about global warming for 50 years — yet in half a century, we’ve done almost nothing to solve it. He explores this and other megatrends that could inspire pessimism. But, he says, there is a more powerful case for optimism. (Recorded March 2007 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 21:01.)

]]>tedstaffskolllogo.gifSubscribe2TEDTalksBug.jpgAnother Brilliant articlehttp://blog.ted.com/another_brillia/
Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:26:35 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2005/11/another_brillia/]]>Dr. Larry Brilliant, the self-proclaimed “luckiest man in the world,” has a great write-up in this week’s Pacific Sun, talking about his TED Prize wish. He says he’s open to ideas on how best to use it, and has set up a new email address – larryswish@seva.org – for suggestions.]]>tedconfamyLarry_brilliant_1Brilliant, Larryhttp://blog.ted.com/brilliant_larry/
Tue, 08 Nov 2005 15:15:43 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2005/11/brilliant_larry/[…]]]>A wonderful evening in Woodside last night with TED Prize Winner Dr Larry Brilliant and 100 TEDsters. He shared a little of his story, his involvement in the eradication of smallpox, and his current desire to do something about the risk of an avian flu pandemic.He was simultaneously terrifying and inspiring, and provoked a remarkable conversation around his WISH TO CHANGE THE WORLD that the TED Prize has granted him. He’s pondering ideas that could address the avian flu risk and/or other global public health issues. If you have a suggestion — one that can tap powerfully into what the TED community can offer — please email TED Prize Director Amy Novogratz, amy@ted.com, and she will forward to Larry. The conversation that began last night will continue until TED06 in Monterey, when Larry will unveil his wish.

Thanks to Arch and Shelly Meredith, Matt Venuti, Kleiner Perkins, June Cohen, all who came out on a wet night, and especially to Larry for giving us an exciting preview of February…

]]>tedchrisLarry_brilliantTED Prize Winner: Larry Brillianthttp://blog.ted.com/ted_prize_winne_1/
Fri, 14 Oct 2005 11:33:01 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2005/10/ted_prize_winne_1/[…]]]>It’s difficult to resist making a pun around the name Larry Brilliant. Board-certified in preventive medicine and public health, Larry lived in India for 10 years — first at a Himalayan monastery, and later as a diplomat working for the UN. He helped lead the successful WHO smallpox-eradication program and later founded the Seva Foundation, an international health nonprofit that’s restored sight to more than two million blind people. Larry also co-founded the legendary online community, The Well. His current passion surrounds the threat of Bird Flu, and he’s hinted that his TED Prize wish will lie somewhere in the realm of global health. He’s open to suggestions …]]>tedconfamyLarry_brilliant1